Watching the vice presidential debate, you might have gotten the impression that Sarah Palin supports civil rights for same-sex couples. During an exchange on the topic, both she and Joe Biden said they oppose gay marriage. But Biden added that he and Barack Obama favor granting gay couples many of the same benefits—hospital visitation rights, health benefits—that married couples enjoy. Palin was tougher to pin down. She clearly didn't want to appear intolerant, but neither did she want to seem to embrace gay rights. "[N]o one would ever propose, not in a McCain-Palin administration, to do anything to prohibit, say, visitations in a hospital or contracts being signed …" she said.The folks in Alaska might have been surprised to hear that. In the past, Palin has described her opposition to granting gay couples the benefits married couples receive. In an August 2007 interview with NEWSWEEK, Palin said she had upheld such benefits (angering fellow conservatives) but only because the...

Steve Grove believes in the wisdom of crowds. And the smartest people he knows are YouTube's estimated 71 million users, who collectively post and watch as many as 2.5 billion online videos a month. As YouTube's political director, Grove, 30, considers himself less an editor than a "curator" of the Web site's "chaotic sea of content." A lot of the site's political fare is anything but high-minded or serious—the sultry YouTube fave "Obama Girl" and all those wonderfully snarky homemade videos mocking Hillary Clinton's robotic laugh or John Edwards's obsessive hair and makeup routine. But user-created clips are also shaping coverage of the 2008 presidential campaign in ways unimagined in 2006, when a viral video of Sen. George Allen calling his rival's campaign worker "macaca" ended the Virginia Republican's career—and led to what Grove calls "the birth of YouTube politics."YouTube, which didn't even exist three years ago, found its way into the mainstream awfully fast. At...

Does your vinyl shower curtain contribute to global warming? Will using a plastic razor doom the polar bears? How many bike trips does it take to offset your environmental sins? For well-meaning but utterly confused consumers, the editors of Grist.org, an environmental Web site, have published "Wake Up and Smell the Planet," a (biodegradable, of course) handbook with tips for greening your life. NEWSWEEK'S Karen Breslau spoke with Grist founder Chip Giller:
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Nothing irks Salt Lake City Mayor Ross (Rocky) Anderson more than seeing people tote water in plastic bottles. In fact, he argues, his city has some of the best tap water in the country. Several months ago, Anderson instructed department heads to stop buying bottled water for the city's 2,200 workers and provide coolers and fountains instead. "For a long time, I've viewed [bottled water] as a huge marketing scam," he says.Considering that Americans chug more than 30 billion single-serving bottles of water a year, Anderson's campaign is at most a drop in the you-know-what. But there are signs of a push to bring back the tap, led by mayors who want to cut down on global warming. Anderson is urging the U.S. Conference of Mayors to promote tap water as a way to limit greenhouse-gas emissions. In San Francisco, residents who sign an online pledge not to buy plastic water bottles get a free stainless-steel water container. Some cities, aware that companies filter and sell municipal tap...